The increase of internet usage has brought a continued surge in data traffic and congestion in the network. Most of the internet users use mobile devices rather than personal computers due to the enhanced mobility and ease of use. However, mobile devices are limited to transport internet data through wireless connections. Since mobile traffic data is transmitted wirelessly, the performance of a mobile phone's wireless connectivity is of great importance. A number of different methods to benchmark the quality of wireless communication chip sets are known. Especially, a packet error rate (PER) measurement is often used. In packet error rate measurement, the mobile devices are tested with different settings, such as transmit power, modulation coding rates, and receiver sensitivities. This results in a complex measurement and requires a long test duration. This is explained in greater detail with reference to FIG. 1 and FIG. 2.
For a great number of wireless communication standards, unicast, multicast and broadcast type transmissions are known. In unicast, a respective device, either a station or an access point, receives frames of data. In case of a successful reception, an acknowledgment is sent back to the sender. The sender therefore has to wait with transmitting a further frame packet until it has received the acknowledgment or decided that the acknowledgment will not arrive. In this case, the same frame is retransmitted.
While a unicast frame is used in one-to-one communication, multicast is used to send data to multiple stations within the communication network. A correctly received multicast frame is not acknowledged so as to limit protocol over head. On the other hand, a broadcast frame is almost similar to a multicast frame, but it is sent to all stations with the communication network. In both cases, multicast and broadcast, an acknowledgment is not sent. Therefore, the transmitting device can send consecutive data frames without having to wait for acknowledgment frames in between.
For measuring purposes though, mainly unicast signals have been used in the past. This is very time inefficient, since the above-mentioned waiting period is necessary after each single data frame has been transmitted. The acknowledgment time delays lead to a very long overall measuring time.
The document “Anritsu, MT8860C WLAN Test Set” shows a measuring setup for measuring the reception performance of a WLAN stick. A measuring device generates a broadcast measuring signal and transmits it wirelessly to the device under test. The device under test determines the packet error rate of the received measuring signal and hands this measuring result to a measuring PC. The measuring PC also can be used for controlling the measuring device.
This measuring system is disadvantageous, since it requires an additional measuring PC for receiving the measuring result from the device under test. This leads to a high hardware effort. Moreover, the additional communication between the measuring PC and the measuring device leads to an increased measuring time.
Accordingly, one object of the invention is to provide a measuring device and a measuring method, which achieve a low measuring time while requiring only a low hardware effort.